A wild park
Mushrooms sprout on a nurse stump
I’ll never forget the first time I visited this park in my new neighbourhood, three years before I moved here. It was March and it started snowing! Between the wild, jagged terrain and the owl appearing in the tall conifers, it left an impression almost more idyllic than my experience of it now.
In the warmer months, one particular path that begins at the street is muddy, almost creek-like. Riddled with stones and pebbles, it’s hard to traverse when it’s so wet and is slightly uphill. Yesterday it was hovering around zero degrees and the pseudo-creek bed was blanketed in ice! It looked like a tiny, frozen river.
The park has a rock cliff in it, sloping down into the trees on one side and ending abruptly above a clearing on the other. This terrain makes stomping through the woods more like an adventure. While there is a gravel trail, other paths disappear into the forest where you’re left to figure out your own route down. Some of it has been worn, even in two directions so you get to choose which route you’d like to explore. Every walk there leads me in a different combination of loops.
Imagine this is how much of Vancouver used to look 200 years ago?
